Matt Wedel: officially, a bastard
I really should stop talking to other people qualified in vertebrate palaeontology. It’s so bloody depressing. “I’m working on this”, “I’m writing about that”, “Oh, and did I mention the award I won?”. Yes, I am very pleased to congratulate my good friend Matt Wedel – whom you may or may not know better as Dr Vector, or as ‘that pneumaticity guy’ (shown here posing with an enormous bone*) – for winning the 2006 International Award on Paleontology. The award stems from his excellent 2005 paper ‘Postcranial skeletal pneumaticity in sauropods and its implications for mass estimates’: required reading here at
* Oh alright, it’s an apatosaurine vertebra.
Kimmeridge Clay dinosaurs post to follow soon, once other assorted crap is out of the way. For the latest news on Tetrapod Zoology do go here.
posted by Darren Naish at 11:56 PM
7 Comments:
Harsh but fair. Perhaps 'Talanted bastard' might be better though......
Pretty small actually. Have a look at Puertasaurus.
Ooooooh no you don't Marjanovic! Never mind titanosaurs: for an apatosaurine the specimen is immense, but to say any more would give too much away. As for Puertasaurus, I've known of that beast since loooong before its publication. Incidentally, the generic name is apparently an in-joke.
Of course, I forgot that Supersaurus is apparently an apatosaurine, but let's not worry about that right now...
Just wanted to mention Supersaurus. :o)
Whatever. I'm looking forward to what the vertebra will turn out to be!
Hi all,
I've tried twice now to comment on this post, and bleepity-bleeping Blogger keeps losing my stuff. Each time the comment gets shorter. This is the third iteration, so you're only going to get the Platonic essence:
1. Many thanks for the kind words. Truly.
2. The big vert in the photo is OMNH 1670. It's not the biggest dinosaur ever, but it is probably the biggest Apatosaurus ever found. I wrote a little about it here:
http://drvector.blogspot.com/2006/07/dr-vector-with-friends.html
...and I'm going to write a lot more about it (in the peer-reviewed, W4TP sense) in the near future.
3. You can find a PDF of the paper Darren mentioned at http://www.sauroposeidon.net/cv.html.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Matt Wedel
P.S. Darren, if all three of these actually come to you for moderation, please just post the first one and ignore the increasingly deranged sequels.
Thanks for your comments Matt. Only one version ever arrived.
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